Thursday, 31 July 2008

Interview conceived by smoky man & Antonio Solinas.Conducted via phone by A. Solinas on 19th February 2008.Originally printed in Italy on Scuola di Fumetto (N. 60, May 2008, Coniglio Editore) and Blue magazine (N. 189, May 2008, Coniglio Editore) on the occasion of the Italian edition of Lost Girls published by Magic Press.Presented here in English for the first time.Lost Girls orginally published by Top Shelf.

13. Obviously [with Lost Girls] you were dealing with a sort of touchy subject, as you said, pornography. Given the vast exposure that your work would receive, was there any conscious attempt to be controversial?

Not at all. You have to remember we started this in 1989, when it was a very different social and sexual climate. Now, back then, for one thing there wasn’t the kind of paedophile panic that has seized Europe and America so brightly in the last decade. Obviously, we were aware of these issues, but there was not the wave of internet paedophilia, which is largely what has caused the sort of semi-hysterical response in some parts of the tabloids press. It was a different time. And also, we weren’t under a George W. Bush presidency: there wasn’t the same leeway given to the religious right, who are notoriously antipathetic to sexual expression or pornography or anything like that. So, we were aware that if we were going to follow this material to what seemed to be its logical end, and if we were going to be honest in our presentation of the work, if we were going to approach it seriously, that of course we would possibly offend various people. That was possible. For example, back when we started, probably the biggest voices raised against pornography were from the feminist camp. Now, we were reading feminine critiques of pornography, because at least they were rational, even if we didn’t agree with them. And we were trying to design Lost Girls to answer a lot of the questions raised by feminism.14. Therefore, there was an effort to raise a debate about what is really pornographic and obscene…
Absolutely. I mean, we couldn’t really take on the Christian anti-pornographic debate, because that is not rational. With the greatest of respect to Christians and the respect to anybody to believe in what they want to believe in, you can’t base a rational argument upon your supposition of what the creator of the universe likes or doesn’t like: that is simply not rational. But the feminist argument was rational, and so we thought about that very deeply and we tried to raise the level of the debate by answering some of those feminist critiques, by making sure that the women that we had as the main characters, they weren’t merely facets, and that the book was not written from a strict perspective of heterosexual men, but it was written for women as much as it was written for men, and it was written for homosexuals as much as it was written for heterosexuals. We were trying our best to make this as beautiful and as bulletproof as possible. We wanted something that was not rigorously politically correct, still a genuine work of pornography (or erotica), but we wanted something that would be just so beautifully drawn and so beautifully written that it would transcend all of the obvious questions about the subject matter. When it came a little closer to the time of the book being published, when we got the work finished and we realised that it would be coming out in 2006 (at least in America), then we started to have a little bit more of an idea as to what sort of reaction we might expect. It was coming out under a George Bush administration, it was coming out in a time which might be seen as particularly risky for a book like Lost Girls: we thought that we might be getting a sort of hysterical tabloid reaction to it, although that has proven not to be the case.

15. Did you devise any strategy to respond to these possible critiques?
We had been through all of the possible questions that we could be asked quite a lot over the past eighteen years, and I think that we could have defended Lost Girls as well as anybody. There was nothing in Lost Girls that I would not have been happy to defend to my last breath. I thought that our motives in doing Lost Girls were unimpeachable, but I was still prepared for encountering people who might not agree with that assessment. Indeed, there were some quite worrying issues: for example, there was the fact that the laws in Canada specifically forbid any drawings of imaginary underage people having sex and class them as child pornography, so we thought that we might very well have problems with Canada. So, what Chris Staros, our publisher did, was to compile a dossier with quotes from prestigious American and British journals talking about Lost Girls, there was a letter of intent from me and Melinda, where we explained our motives, and we got back a wonderful letter from the Canadian Customs Authority, basically saying that, even though there were scenes that were tantamount to bestiality or incest, this could in no way be consider obscene, and even though it did appear that there were underage people taking part in some of the sex scenes, this could in no way be considered as child pornography, and that it was a work of great social and artistic benefit. This is pretty much what the British Customs said: I mean, we didn’t know how they would respond to it, but eventually they gave us the all clear to import it, saying that on artistic grounds, it is seen as a work of art, and therefore exempt from the debate upon pornography. Even in fundamentalist America there have been no copies of Lost Girls seized, even though most much more innocuous books have been seized from shops, especially in the Southern States. But no seizures of Lost Girls. I think that in some ways it’s surprising, but I wonder if in some ways it’s a response to the fact that we called this pornography from the start. I think that the surprising lack of a hostile response that we received for Lost Girls may have something to do with the fact that from the very beginning we have insisted upon calling this a work of pornography. I think if we had come out and said: “This is a work of art”, then the instinctive reflex reaction from its critics would have been to have said: “No, this is a work of pornography”. It seems that by coming out and saying: “This is a work of pornography”, then, most of the people who have read it, who would potentially have been our critics, have been wrong-footed in some way so that they had to respond: “No, this is a work of art” (laughs). I am not entirely sure why this has happened, but I am very glad it has, and I think that also me and Melinda were both pleased that, although we couldn’t have known that (the book) would be coming out in 2006, it has done. Because if it had come out say seven or eight years earlier, then it would have come out during a Clinton administration, which was significantly more liberal than the Bush administration, and the world, although by no means free of war, was a lot less war-toned than this at present. And one of the most important things in Lost Girls, as well as its pro-sexuality message, is its anti-war message.

16. Is this the reason why you chose to set the book in 1913?
Well, we originally chose to set it then because those were the dates suggested by the three characters. When we decided upon those three characters, we tried to work out imaginary chronologies for them, based upon the publication dates of the three books, and we realised that if we wanted to tell a story in which Dorothy was not too young nor Alice too old, then we were pretty much restricted to this kind of window around about the 1913 to 1915 period. And that immediately suggested all sorts of things, the First World War, the debut of the Rite of Spring at the Paris Opera, the resulting riot. It seemed such a wonderful backdrop against which to set our story, because that particular period was the juncture of lots of different things: in terms of politics, the world was changing, and it would never be exactly the same again, but the world of art was also reaching a point of change and crisis. You have got the remnants of a more romantic art nouveau sensibility, but you have also got the birth of modernism, at around the same time.

17. Did you try to convey this, in terms of visual imagery, into the book?
That’s right. You know, it provided a sort of stark contrast, everything to the way the characters were dressed, and all of this made a beautiful and stark setting, a backdrop against which to place our fairly delicate emotional sexual fantasies that were going on in the foreground. And yes, we were glad it had come out, somehow, in 2006, because, if it (the book) had come out eight years earlier, in a less war-toned, a more liberal American administration, it might not have been so relevant. The contrast that it struck might not have seemed quite so stark or so pointed. So, I think we are both very glad that it’s coming out when it is, because I think that if ever the world actually needed a book like this, it’s probably around now, that it seems that this rather simplistic hippie message, perhaps, of “make love, not war”, it seems that we need that restating, every once in a while, and I think that the current period that we are moving through, is one of those periods in which that message does need to be restated, because we appear to have forgotten it.

18. How many times have you been asked if you were trying to redeem the pornographic genre? Do you find it annoying? No, because it’s a straightforward question, and of course, yes, I was trying to redeem the genre. I mean, one of the things that I like that I have noticed a pattern in the way that I tend to work is, I look for areas of culture that are neglected, and which I feel have got potentially a great deal of importance. That would apply to comic books, back when I entered the field, it would apply to pornography, and it would apply to magic. All of these are areas that are of potentially tremendous importance and tremendous value, but they are completely neglected. I find that kind of territory very fertile, and it’s something that I enjoy doing, especially if nobody has done it before, which was very definitely the case with Lost Girls. I mean, not just in comics, but actually in the much broader world of erotic art and writing, there has never been anything of the scale and ambition of Lost Girls, even if it took us a long time to do it.
I am not saying there never will another work (like that), but you’re going to at least have to wait for another eighteen years before it appears.

19. In this respect, although there is no doubt about the high value of Lost Girls, did you get exposed to “low-class pornography”? How did you re-work that kind of material and how do you relate to the porn industry?
When I did Watchmen, yes, I was bringing in values from outside comics, but Watchmen was a result of reading an awful lot of crappy American superhero comics. I had to absorb all of the tropes and the traditions of the genre in order to be able to write it properly, or to write a newer version of it. That was true of pornography. I’ve not got really any time for most modern pornography. My interest in pornography does tend to evaporate around about the Edwardian period. I mean, there are some exceptions to that: there are some of the Olympia Press novels and things of the 50’s that were very, very good, and the early 60’s, but I tend to find that, to some degree, the Golden Age of pornography was probably the Victorian-Edwardian era. That’s not to say that the stuff was without problems, or either that it was terribly good, but there were some good things about it. In my by no means extensive readings, I kind of isolated a few things that I thought were good about that Victorian-Edwardian pornography, and I tried to import them into Lost Girls. I think it was the same, to some degree, for Melinda with the artwork. She was looking at illustrators and artists that she actually found some resonance in, in that kind of material, and she was kind of trying to bring those values to the artwork. You got to be aware of what the other material is, out there, although really that’s not to say that we have ever bothered with looking at any pornographic movies or pornographic internet sites or anything like that (laughs). I mean, we don’t have an internet connection, and that stuff doesn’t really interest us. We are print media people, and we wanted this to be something that reflected the values of literature and art in a period when those things still had high standards and values.

9. Would you be willing to try and do something of that sort again, or do you think [Lost Girls] will be unique to the kind of relationship you have with Melinda?
No, I don’t think that, having done Lost Girls, I’d ever want to do anything like that again. I mean, in terms of what I am, I think that I’ve kind of come back to my initial position, where I am including sexuality as another facet of whatever story I am actually working upon. So, in the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, especially in the upcoming issues, there is a much more frank approach to sexuality. It’s just included among all of the other elements of the story. I don’t think that I’d ever particularly want to actually do another thing specifically about sex or sexuality. I think that really, in the eighteen years that it’s taken us to do Lost Girls, we pretty much said everything that we actually wanted to say.

10. I was talking, in more general terms, about the way you collaborated with another artist…
Well, I mean, one of the things that made it possible to collaborate like this is (the fact that) Melinda is the first artist I collaborated with who’s actually been living here in Northampton. So that meant that I could do the thumbnails, because I should explain that my thumbnails are fairly inscrutable (I mean, I make no claims to my artistic abilities), and with Melinda I could sort of sit down with her and I could show her this page of basically scribbles, and I could say: “Yes, this kind of thing that you might have mistaken for a deformed weather balloon, bobbing at the bottom of this panel, that is actually one of the characters heads, and that is looking away from us”. So I could talk her through the thumbnails, and she could see what I was trying to convey. Now, that’s not been the case with any of the other collaborators, and it takes me so long, to actually draw something so that people can see what it’s actually meant to be (laughs) that it’s much quicker and easier for me to type up a page of script describing the thing, and I can be much more exact in my description than I can be with my actual drawn artwork.
I’m not ruling it out altogether, but I think it’s very unlikely that I shall ever collaborate with somebody in quite the way, quite as intensely as me and Melinda have collaborated upon Lost Girls.
You tend to find that each book that you do, it tends to suggest its own way of working, and our working methods upon Lost Girls just simply grew out of the work itself and demands upon the pair of us, and we eventually came up with something that we were really happy with and which suited us and then worked perfectly, you know, but I think it’s very unlikely that that would happen again, simply because I don’t really trust my drawing abilities enough to simply send somebody a bunch of photocopies of my scribbles and expect them to make anything out of it.
With Kevin (O’Neill) on the League, on this third book I am back to writing incredibly long scripts with incredibly detailed descriptions.

11. If the result is what you normally get, I suppose you can be happy with that…
That’s right. I mean, different artists, different jobs, require different means of working, and I don’t think that Kevin’s work would be greatly improved, or I don’t think that the League would be improved with my pencil sketches. It’s just a different work and I don’t think it would work as well as it did so obviously work on Lost Girls.

12. I was interested because there is some sort of myth of you been an absolute controller of the comics you write, of which you must be aware of…
I certainly do, although in my actual relationship with the artist, it’s a lot more easygoing than that (laughs). I mean, all the stuff that is there in the script is meant as a suggestion, and Kevin said that most of the times the way the panels are described is probably about the best kind of shot, but sometimes, he’ll think of a better one, because he’s an artist, and he’s got better visual sensibilities than me. And just like there was some of my pencil layouts and drawing for Lost Girls, where Melinda would modify them because she could see an easier or better way of doing them.
You’ve always got to leave, especially when it comes to the visuals, the artist room to do whatever they want, to a certain degree. All you’ve got to do is to provide them the structure that they can then hang whatever kind of flesh they want upon. The plot, the rest of it, is a sort of skeleton, and if you are certain of that, if you are certain it’s a secure skeleton, then you can be as fabulous in your decoration of the flesh of the piece as you want, really.

Tuesday, 29 July 2008

Interview conceived by smoky man & Antonio Solinas.Conducted via phone by A. Solinas on 19th February 2008.Originally printed in Italy on Scuola di Fumetto (N. 60, May 2008, Coniglio Editore) and Blue magazine (N. 189, May 2008, Coniglio Editore) on the occasion of the Italian edition of Lost Girls published by Magic Press.Presented here in English for the first time.

6. Obviously Lost Girls had some implications on your personal life as well, so that’s a bonus, I guess…

In some ways, our lives and the work that we were doing together obviously became intertwined. I don’t think that we could have done this work together if we hadn’t been in a serious relationship together. And given that that is what has happened, I think that the two things have been incredibly beneficial to each other. I think that because when it came to working on Lost Girls, right from the very start, we would have to be frank in all of our thoughts and ideas which, in a lot of relationships, people can reach the end of their relationship without ever having discussed anything so intimate or personal, so that was the point on which me and Melinda’s relationship started, and that’s been to the benefit of our relationship, certainly. And on the other hand, I think that the fact that we are in this relationship has been of a tremendous importance to Lost Girls because in a lot of pornography, no matter how well written or drawn it may be, there is a certain coldness to it. There is a certain emotional distance from the words or images. It very often seems to be acted out by emotionless puppets and that is one of the things in pornography that I think we both found alienating, and so I think that what actually happened with Lost Girls was it’s got an awful lot of warmth, an awful lot of compassion, it’s very inclusive of a broad range of ordinary human activities and feelings and emotions, and it’s probably the fact that me and Melinda are in a warm and emotional relationship that has given Lost Girls an awful lot of its emotional depth, so I think the two things have a benefit to each other, really.

7. In the introduction for a recent edition of Writing for Comics that just came out in Italy, Rick Veitch talks about how your ideas are basically fully formed since the beginning. I suppose in this case, although there a strong core idea, we could say that the growth of the comic went hand in hand with a growth both as a partner and as a man.

Yes, that is true. Although what Rick was saying about my ideas been pretty fully formulated is true to a great extent (I mean certainly I knew roughly what was in all 30 episodes of Lost Girls before I started it, just like I kind of had a rough idea of how me and Melinda’s relationship would go), but at the same time with both of them, if you knew everything about it, wouldn’t be a lot of fun. So, even though we got the basic plot structure of Lost Girls worked out, there were still things that we were revising, chapter by chapter, page by page: the details, the way that the story was told, in Melinda’s case the visual approach to each story. These were details that we didn’t have written in stone right from the beginning. These were things that we left to be discovered along the way, just because that would be a more enjoyable experience. I mean, yes I do like to have my ideas pretty much sorted out right from the word go, so that I know where the thing is going to end, and roughly how it’s going to get from the beginning to the end, but I prefer to at least leave some surprises to myself.

8. Was this a pretty unique form of collaboration, in this respect?

Well, I think that certainly Lost Girls, amongst all of my collaborations, is completely unique. For one thing, from very early on, we came to a kind of a problem in our working methods. Melinda had been a writer/artist, she had been writing and drawing her own scripts: now, I had been used to working with comic book artists from the mainstream who were used to receiving scripts (even if they weren’t used to receiving scripts quite as long as detailed as mine are), but Melinda had never worked from a script, up to that point. So, when I was giving her these huge thick documents that would be a few dozen pages just for an eight-page chapter, I think it was very difficult for her to actually visualise from my panel description, the kind of scenes that I had in mind, so very early on, perhaps half a dozen chapters, where we had done it in script form (and, you know, it had worked fine), we thought that we could improve the process if I was to actually do thumbnail sketches (quite detailed thumbnail sketches), and then they would be given to Melinda, who would do the completed artwork, and would be of course adding an immense amount to my thumbnail sketches. And then, at the end of this, I would look at the completed artwork and there was a lot of room for serendipity. If Melinda had put a certain expression upon one of the characters faces, or had included some atmospheric touch, then I could allow that to colour the writing, so it was a much more complete and seamless collaboration than many of my previous ones. I mean, Melinda was contributing to the writing, in the sense that all of the scenes that we did were discussed thoroughly, and I was trying to take as many of Melinda’s ideas and her likes and dislikes on board as possible, and trying to tailor each chapter to Melinda’s skills, so the very writing was done with an awful lot of input (either direct or indirect) by Melinda, and the art had got an awful lot of input, in the way of my thumbnail sketches, from me. We were both involved in each other’s part of the process, if you like. It was a very close collaboration, as I say, it’s probably the closest collaboration that I have done, in terms of it kind resembling the work of one individual.

Friday, 25 July 2008

Interview conceived by smoky man & Antonio Solinas.Conducted via phone by A. Solinas on 19th February 2008.Originally printed in Italy on Scuola di Fumetto (N. 60, May 2008, Coniglio Editore) and Blue magazine (N. 189, May 2008, Coniglio Editore) on the occasion of the Italian edition of Lost Girls published by Magic Press.Presented here in English for the first time.Moore and Gebbie photo by José Villarrubia.Lost Girls originally published by Top Shelf.

1. The first question I would like to ask you is about the genesis of Lost Girls. Do you want to elaborate on that?I suppose, from my point of view, I have always been interested in the idea of the sexuality of the characters, ever since I started working in mainstream comics, because it just seemed to me a necessary part of characterisation.Back then, I would try to work in, if it was appropriate, some kind of sex scene into the comic that I was writing because I felt that that made for a more rounded character. But it was a bit of an encumbrance, because I was mostly writing about monsters or superheroes. I mean, I think we did some very good work, regarding the sexuality of these characters, but I always had a feeling that I would have liked to do something more extensive, something which was entirely based on sexuality and the sexual imagination.

2. Was this based on the fact that, for example, the sexual subtext in Watchmen was dumbed down by the people that followed in your path?I think that is true to a certain degree. I mean, for example, when we were doing the sexual issues of Swamp Thing, we were trying to find new ways of expressing this kind of ideas, but when it was applied to superheroes, in the hands of a lot of people that followed me, it seemed to degenerate quite quickly to a sort of a smutty joke, essentially a smutty joke, which was never anything that I have been that interested in.So I was very keen to do something about sex that hadn’t anything to do with superheroes or licensed characters of that nature, and I have been trying to think of some way to actually do this. But it was easier said than done. Every idea that I came up with, when I actually thought it through, it wasn’t really any different from the pornography that I saw around me, and which I found dull or distressing.It was very difficult to actually think of a form of pornography that wouldn’t fall into the same crap. Partly that was because I had been programmed, I suppose, by my work in the industry, to think in terms of collaborating with another man, simply because most of the people (if not all of them) I had collaborated with, up to that point, had all been men, just because of the sexual imbalance of the comics industry.But I had been approached, some time in 1989, by some people that were doing an erotic anthology, that was going to be called Lost Horizons of the Shangri-La. The magazine never came out, but initially they contacted me and asked me if I would like to do an eight-page story. When I was thinking about someone to collaborate with, I suddenly thought of Melinda Gebbie, because I’d admired Melinda’s work for a long time. I had been following her work in the underground: I had written an article over here, in which I had singled out Melinda for praise because I certainly thought that she was one of the best artists in the underground. I didn’t think there was any need to qualify that by even saying “best FEMALE artist”: she was one the best artists, full stop. I didn’t realise at that point, that Melinda had also been approached by the same anthology title, but a friend of ours, Neil Gaiman, the writer, knew Melinda. He had sort of seen her recently, and he offered to put us in contact. So when we first hooked up, we expressed an interest in working with each other, and Melinda would come up here at the weekends, and we spent two or three weeks just trying to work out what we did and didn’t want to to. It was still very difficult coming up with an idea that completely suited both of us, but we spent a lot of time talking about what we didn’t like in current erotica or pornography and, at some point during all this, we were throwing ideas back and forth: I remembered a not entirely satisfactory idea that I had at some time in the past, which was that it might be possible to do a sexually decoded narrative based upon J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. This was for completely simplistic reasons, and it was purely because in Peter Pan there are a lot of flying scenes, and because Sigmund Freud had said that dreams of flying are an expression of sexuality. As I said, it wasn’t a particularly brilliant or insightful idea, but I just threw it out there to see if it had anything about it. Melinda countered by saying she’d always enjoyed doing strips that had three women characters in a dynamic relationship: there was a strip that she had done called My Three Swans that would adopt a relationship between three strong women characters. Somehow, the two ideas crossbred. I started to think: “Well, if one is Wendy from Peter Pan - which was one of the characters that Melinda wanted to tell the story about - who would be the other two?”, and obviously the names Alice from Alice in Wonderland and Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz came to mind immediately.It was right there in that moment, when we said those three names in conjunction with each other, that we realised what a fantastic and appropriate idea it was. We had almost come up with it by accident, but there were such a lot of possibilities that seemed to explode out of that conjunction of those three very famous children’s book characters, and that was the point at which Lost Girls began to take shape at an alarming rate. As soon as we had those names together, all the other details kind of grew out of that really.

3. Throughout your career, you have always seemed to be inclined to play with archetypes. In the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, as well as Watchmen and From Hell, you have picked up archetypal characters and given them a lot more depth than other people that used those archetypes before. Where does this attitude stem from and is it possible to draw a comparison between Lost Girls and these other works, in a way?I suppose it is possible to draw similarities in the sense that I, in whichever area I am working on, I try to work as fully as possible with the kind of furniture of that genre or that character. I try to invest as much of myself as I can in any given character, and I suppose that these archetypal characters reflect really, just the way that I see characters. I tend to think that most characters, in some way, even the interchangeable ones, if they are treated right, can become almost archetypal. I mean, you’ve only got to look at Charles Dickens, where some of the most memorable characters that have become archetypes are the lowliest seeming characters, his Huriah Heep, his Fagin, people like that. I think that it is what you invest into these characters that makes them archetypal and I think that, if anything, the fact that this kind of approach to characters does tends to turn up a lot in my work is because that is how I see or how I try to see all the fictional characters that I deal with, even the worst ones. If I can do something to make them a bit more memorable or archetypal I will do.With Lost Girls, there was a tremendous fascination because of not just the fact that we had these three archetypal children’s book characters, I suppose, but the fact that we had them in an erotic story that imagined a projected later life for all of those characters. It’s not just the characters themselves, it’s the context that you present them in. I mean, as with Watchmen, it wasn’t just the superheroes, it was the fact that we presented them in the context of this pseudo-realistic world that had a political dimension, as well as other dimensions that people didn’t really expect in a comic book of that period. With Lost Girls, it was trying to take history characters, who we associate with apparently innocent children’s fiction, and it was thinking that, since we all read those stories when we were children, or had them read to us, or were aware of them in some way, whatever gender we are, in a sense, we were identifying with those child protagonists, back then. In a sense, they were us, and, before Lost Girls, they remained at the age they were when those stories were told, whereas we grew up. We grew up, our bodies changed, our minds changed, our emotions changed…

4. Our desires changed, I suppose…That was it. We suddenly became less innocent and pink-cheeked than those characters we identified so much with when we were children, and yet, I think that even in books that purely have children as their main characters, there is a kind of an implication that these characters will grow up. I mean, indeed, in Peter Pan (alone among those three books), by the end of the book, Wendy is grown up and she has a child of hers, which kind of implies that she’s had sex, at some point (laugh), in the normal run of things. So it didn’t seem to us illegitimate to actually project these famous child characters forward into a kind of an imagined adulthood and, in some ways, we thought that that would have a lot of resonance because, to a degree, even if we are telling it in a phantasmagoric form, we are telling the story of our condition, we are telling the story of what it was like for all of us when, at whatever young and tender age (or not so young and tender age) it was, that we entered into our sexuality and we found it to be a strange and puzzling world, every bit as bewildering and illogical as Oz, or Neverland or Wonderland. And it was when we hip upon those three characters that we realised that we got a perfect metaphor, in a sense. In those three characters we had a perfect metaphor for how bewildering and disorienting the landscape of sex is when all of us first discover it, you know.

5. This, I suppose, was all part of the preparation of Lost Girls, but, going back to what you told me earlier, it was supposed to be an eight-page story. Did you at any point have a “mini-version” of Lost Girls, or did you realise at the early stages that it would have been impossible to contain the concept in 8 pages?We realised very quickly. Like I said, when we got those three basic characters in place, the story started to expand and grow from there, and we realised that, if we were going to do it justice (we realised that it was such a good idea that we would have to do it justice) that it was far too good to squander in an eight or sixteen-page story. We rapidly realised that it was going to take thirty 8page episodes or 240 pages.Now, at the time, we didn’t realise that it would take us something like 17 or 18 years to actually finish it. But I think that if we had realised, it was still such a good idea that I think that we would have probably gone ahead with it anyway. Even if we had known how much work that would entail, you know, we were so enthusiastic about the idea that we had to do it.